Part 7

“Now there’s lots of things I could say to you this evening; but the only one I want to jam right home is this: You and us look at this thing from different points of view. You come here hoping that we’re going to help you to keep straight. That’s all right. So we are; and we’ll all be on the job from this night forward. You won’t find us taking no vacation, and your next friends here’ll worry you like your own consciences. They’ll never leave you alone the minute you ain’t safe. You’ll hear ’em promise to hunt for you if you go astray, and go down into the ditch with you and pull you out. There’ll be no dive so deep that they won’t go after you, and no kicks and curses that you can give ’em that they won’t stand in order to haul you back. That’s all gospel true, as you’re going to find out if you go back on your promises. But that ain’t the way the rest of us—the hundred and fifty of us that you see here to-night—looks at it at all. What we see ain’t two men we’re tumbling over each other to help; we see two men that’s coming to help us. And, oh, men, you’d better believe that we need your help! You look round and you see this elegant house—and the beds—and the grub—and everything decent and reg’lar—and you think how swell we’ve got ourselves fixed. But I tell you, men, we’re fighting for our life—the whole hundred and fifty of us! And another hundred and fifty that ain’t here! And another hundred and fifty that’s scattered to the four winds of the earth; we’re fighting for our life; we’re fighting with our back against the wall. We ain’t out of danger because we’ve been a year or two years or five years in the club. We’re never out of danger. We need every ounce of support that any one can bring to us; and here you fellows come bringing it! You’re bringing it, Colin MacPherson, and you’re bringing it, Tapley Toms; and there ain’t a guy among us that isn’t glad and grateful. If you go back on your own better selves you go back on us first of all; and if either of you falls, you leave each one of us so much the weaker.”

That, with a funny story or two, was the gist of it; but delivered in a low, richly vibrating voice, audible in every corner of the room and addressed directly and earnestly to the two candidates, its effect was not unlike that of Whitfield’s dying man preaching to dying men. All the scarred, haunted faces, behind each of which there lurked memories blacker than those of the madhouse, were turned toward the speaker raptly. Knowledge of their own hearts and knowledge of his gave the words a power and a value beyond anything they carried on the surface. The red-hot experience of a hundred and fifty men was poured molten into the minute, to give to the promises the two postulants were presently called on to make a kind of iron vigor.

Those promises were simple. Colin MacPherson and Tapley Toms took the total-abstinence pledge for a week, after which they would be asked to renew it for similar periods till they felt strong enough to take it for a month. They would remain as residents of the club till morally re-established, but they would look for work, in which the club would assist them, and send at least three-quarters of their earnings to their wives. As soon as they were strong enough they would set up homes for their families again, and try to atone for their failure in the mean time. They would do their best to strengthen other members of the club, and to live in peace with them. The religious question was shelved by asking each man to give his word to reconnect himself with the church in which he had been brought up.

The promises exacted of the next friends were, as became veterans, more severe. They were to be guardians of the most zealous activity, and shrink from no insult or injury in the exercise of their functions. If their charges fell irretrievably away, their brothers in the club would be sorry for them, even though the guilt would not be laid at their door.

When some twenty or thirty members had renewed their vows for a third or fourth or fifth week, as the case happened to be, the meeting broke up for refreshments.

It was during this finale to the evening that Coningsby brought up a man somewhat of his own type, and yet different. He was different in that, though of the same rank and age, he was tall and dark, and carried himself with a slight stoop of the shoulders. An olive complexion touched off with well-rounded black eyebrows and a neat black mustache made one take him at first for a foreigner, while the dreaminess of the dark eyes was melancholy and introspective, if not quite despondent.

“Melbury, I want you to know Doctor Cantyre, who holds the honorable office of physician in ordinary to the club.”

Once more I was in conversation with a man of antecedents similar to my own, and once more the breaking of the ice was that between men accustomed to the same order of associations. In this case we found them in Cantyre’s tourist recollections of Montreal and Quebec, and his enjoyment of winter sports.

_CHAPTER VI_

There was nothing more than this to the meeting that night, but early the next afternoon I was called to the telephone. As such a summons was rare in the club, I went to the instrument in some trepidation.

“Hello! This is Frank Melbury.”

“This is Doctor Cantyre. You remember that we met last evening?”

“Oh, rather!”

“I’m motoring out in my runabout to see a patient who lives a few miles up the river, and I want you to come along.”

The invitation, which would mean nothing to you but a yes or a no, struck me almost speechless. There was first the pleasure of it. I have not laid stress on the fact that the weather was sickeningly hot, because it didn’t enter into our considerations. We were too deeply concerned with other things to care much that the house was stifling; and yet stifling it was. But more important than that was the fact that any one in the world should want to show me this courtesy. Remember that I had been beyond the reach of courtesies. A drink from some one who would expect me to give him a drink in return was the utmost I had known in this direction for months, and I might say for years.

Is it any wonder that in my reply I stammered and stuttered and nearly sobbed?

“Oh, but, I say, I—I look too beastly for an expedition of—of that sort. I’m awfully sorry, but—but I—well, you know how it is.”

“Oh, get out! You’ve got to have the air. I’m your doctor. I’m not going to see you cooped up there day after day in weather like this. Besides, I’m bringing along a couple of dust-coats—the roads will be dusty part of the way—and we shall both be covered up. Expect me by half past two.”

As he put up the receiver without waiting for further protests, there was nothing for me but submission.

“I’ve been ’ere as long as you ’ave,” Lovey complained when I told him of my invitation, “and nobody don’t ask me to go hout in no automobiles.”

“Oh, but they will.”

He shook his head.

“Them swells’ll take you away, sonny. See if they don’t.”

“Not from you, Lovey.”

He grabbed me by the arm.

“Will you promise me that, Slim?”

“Yes, Lovey; I promise you.”

“And we’ll go on being buddies, even when the rich guys talks to you about all them swell things?”

“Yes, Lovey. We’re buddies for life.”

With this Mizpah between us he released my arm and I was able to go and make my preparations.

In spite of the heat and the fact that on a windless day there was no dust to speak of, Cantyre was buttoned up in a dust-coat. It would have seemed the last word in tact if he hadn’t gone further by pretending to be occupied in doing something to the steering-wheel while I hid my seedy blue serge in the long linen garment he handed me out. As even an old golf-cap can look pretty decent, I was really like anybody else by the time I had snuggled myself in by his side.

During the first mile or two of the way I could hardly listen to Cantyre, to say nothing of making conversation. In spasmodic sentences between his spells of attention to the traffic he told me of his patient and where she lived; but as it was nothing I was obliged to register in my mind, I could give myself to the wonder of the occasion, in awe at the miracle which had restored me to something like my old place in the world at the very moment when I seemed farthest away from it. Here I was, with not a penny to my name and not two coats to my back, tooling along like a gentleman with a gentleman, and as a man with his friend. Moreover, here I was with a new revelation, a convincing revelation, of something I had long since ceased to believe—that in this world there was such a thing as active brotherly kindness.

I came out of these thoughts to find that we were following the avenue with part of which I had made myself so familiar ten days before. I began to ask myself if Cantyre had a motive in bringing me this way. The houses were thinning out. Vacant lots became frequent. I noted the southern limit of my pacings up and down on that strange midnight. Cantyre slowed the pace perceptibly. My heart thumped. If he accused me of anything, I was resolved to confess all.

As we passed one particular vacant lot, a tangle of nettle, fireweed, and blue succory, I noticed that Cantyre’s gaze roamed round about it, to the neglect of the machine. We had slowed down to perhaps ten miles an hour.

“Do you know whose house that is?” he asked, suddenly.

But I refused to betray myself before it was necessary.

“Whose?” I riposted.

“Sterling Barry, the architect’s.”

The machine almost stopped. He looked the façade up and down, saying, as he did so: “It’s closed for the season. They left town a few days ago. Barry’s bought the old Hornblower place at Rosyth, Long Island.”

To my relief, we sped on again; but I was not long in learning the motive behind his interest.

Chiefly for the sake of not seeming dumb, I said, as we got into the country, “You and Ralph Coningsby are by way of being great friends, aren’t you?”

“No,” he replied, promptly. “I see him when I go to the club; not very often elsewhere. I know his sister, Elsie Coningsby, better. Not that I know her very well. She happens to be a great friend of—of a—of a great friend—or, rather, some one who was a great friend—of mine. That’s all.”

So that was it!

I said, after we had spun along some few miles more, “Your name is Stephen, isn’t it?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

I hedged. “Oh, I must have heard some one call you that.”

“That’s funny. Hardly any one does. They mostly say Cantyre—or just doctor.” He added, after a minute or two, “You call me Stephen, and I’ll call you Frank.”

Once more the swift march of happenings gave me a slight shock.

“Oh, but we hardly know each other.”

“That would be true if there weren’t friendships that outdistance acquaintanceships.”

“Oh, if you look at it that way—”

“That’s the way it strikes me.”

“But, good Heavens! man, think of what—of what I am!”

His gaze was fixed on the stretch of road ahead of him.

“What’s that got to do with it? It wouldn’t make any difference to me if you were a murderer or a thief.”

“How do you know I’m not?” I couldn’t help asking.

“I don’t know that you’re not; but I say it wouldn’t make any difference to me if you were.”

The word I am tempted to use of myself at this unexpected offer of good-will is flabbergasted. I am not emotional; still less am I sentimental; both in sentiment and emotion my tendency is to go slow.

After a brief silence I said: “Look here! Do you go round making friends among the riffraff of mankind?”

“I don’t go round making friends among people of any sort. I’m not the friendly type. I know lots of people, of course; but—but I don’t get beyond just knowing them.”

“Is that because you don’t want to?”

“Not altogether. I’m a—I’m a lonesome sort of bloke. I never was a good mixer; and when you’re not that, other fellows instinctively close up their ranks against you and shut you out. Not that that matters to me. I hardly ever see a lot with whom I should want to get in. You’re—you’re an exception.”

“And for Heaven’s sake, why?”

“Oh, for two or three reasons—which I’m not going to tell you. One of these days you may find out.”

We left the subject there and sped along in silence.

This, then, was the man Regina Barry had turned down; and, notwithstanding his kindness to myself, I could understand her doing it. For a high-spirited girl such as she evidently was he would have been too melancholy. “Very nice” was what she had called him, and very nice he was; but he lacked the something thoroughly masculine that means more to women than to men. Men are used to the eternal-feminine streak in themselves and one another; but women put up with it only when it is like a flaw in an emerald, noticeable to the expert, but to no one else.

I asked him how he came to be what Coningsby called physician in ordinary to the club.

“By accident. Rufus Legrand asked me to go over and see what I could do for a bad case of D. T.”

“He’s the rector of the church opposite, isn’t he?”

“Yes, and an awfully good sort. Only parson I know who thinks more of God than he does of a church. I shouldn’t be surprised if one of these days he got the true spirit of religion.”

“What’s that?”

“What they’re doing at the Down and Out.”

“Oh, but they skip religion there altogether.”

“They don’t skip religion; they only skip the word—and for a reason.”

“What reason?”

“The reason that it’s been so misapplied as to have become nearly unintelligible. If you told the men at the club that such and such a thing was religion they’d most of ’em kick like the deuce; but when they get the thing without explanation they take to it every time. But you were asking me about my connection with the club. It began four years ago, when they first got into Miss Smedley’s house. Fellow had the old-fashioned horrors—bad. As I’d been making dipsomania a specialty Legrand railroaded me in, and there I’ve stayed.”

When we drew up at the gate of an old yellow mansion standing in large grounds Cantyre left me in the machine while he went in to visit his patient. The blue-green hills were just beginning to veil themselves in the diaphanous mauve of afternoon, and between them the river with its varied life flowed silently and rapidly. It was strange to me to remember that a short time ago I had been wishing myself under it, and that this very water would be washing the oozy, moss-grown piles of Greeley’s Slip.

_CHAPTER VII_

No later than that evening my life took still another step.

A little before nine, just as I was about to go to bed—our hours at the club were early—Ralph Coningsby dropped in for a word with me. I happened to be at the foot of the stairs in the hall when Spender admitted him, and he refused to come farther inside.

“Been dining with my wife’s father and mother over the way,” he said, in explanation of his dinner jacket and black tie, “and just ran across to say something while I was in the neighborhood. You said last night you’d come and see the Grace Memorial with me.”

“If you say so,” I smiled, “I suppose I must have; but it’s the first time to my knowledge that I ever heard of it.”

“Oh, that’s the bit of work I told you about—the thing I’m doing on my own. It’s over here at St. David’s. You see, when Charlie Grace died he left a sum of money to build and endow this institution in memory of his father.”

I smiled again.

“I know I must have heard the name of Charlie Grace, but it seems to have slipped my memory. All the same—”

“I’ll tell you about him to-morrow. I merely want to say now that I’ll look in about ten in the morning, and take you across the street—”

The difficulty I had had to confront in the afternoon was before me again.

“I don’t know about that, Coningsby. The fact is I’m not—Well, hang it all! Can’t you see? I haven’t a rag in the world but what I stand up in, and I can’t go where I’m likely to run into decent people.”

“You won’t run into any one but carpenters and painters. I’m not going to take no for an answer, old chap. Besides, there’s method in this madness, for—now don’t buck!—for I’m going to put you on a job.”

I could only stare vacantly.

“On a job?”

“Mrs. Grace wants some measurements and specifications which she thinks I haven’t given her exactly enough; and the first thing to be done is to go over the whole blooming place with a foot-rule and a tape-measure; but I’ll tell you about that to-morrow, too. For a chap with your training it will be office-boy’s work; but as you’re doing nothing else for the moment—”

It is needless to say that I hardly slept that night. It was not the prospect of work alone that excited me; it was that of being gradually drawn into the sphere in which I might meet Regina Barry. I was still uncertain as to whether I wanted to do that or not. There was no hour of the day when I didn’t think of her, and yet it was always with a sense of thankfulness that she couldn’t know where I was or guess at what had become of me. If I could have been granted the privilege of seeing her without having her see me I should have jumped at it; but the ordeal of her recognition was beyond my strength to face. Rather than have her say with her eyes, “You were the man who came into my room and tried to rob me,” I would have shot myself.

And yet I had to admit the fact that this danger was in the air. Ralph Coningsby’s sister was the Elsie of that tragic night; Cantyre was the Stephen. I was being offered work by Sterling Barry’s partner, and might soon be doing it for Sterling Barry himself. The fatality that brought about these unfoldings might go farther still, and before I knew it I might find myself in the precise situation that filled me with terror—and yet made me shiver with a kind of harsh delight. Before I could sleep I had to make a compromise with my courage. I would not shoot myself rather than meet her. I would meet her first, if it had to be. I would take that one draft of the joy I had put forever out of reach—and shoot myself afterward.

But in the morning I was more self-confident. Having examined myself carefully in the cracked mirror in the bath-room, I found that my mustache, which had grown tolerably long and thick, changed my appearance not a little. Moreover, food, rest, and sobriety had smoothed away the unspeakable haggardness that had creased my forehead, hardened my mouth, and burnt into my eyes that woebegone desolation which I had noticed among my companions when I arrived at the club. It is no exaggeration to say that I was not only younger by ten years, but that I was changed in looks, as a landscape is changed when, after being swept by rains, it is bathed in sunshine. The one hope I built on all this was that, were I to meet Regina Barry face to face, she would not recognize me at a first glance, while I could keep her from getting a second.

On the way across the street Coningsby told me something of Charlie Grace and his memorial. He had been the son of a former rector of St. David’s—an important man in the New York of his day, who had outlived his usefulness and been asked to resign his parish. The son had never forgiven this slight, and the William Grace Memorial was intended to avenge it. It had been the express desire of the widow, Mrs. Charlie Grace, that he, Ralph Coningsby, should have sole charge of the building, and the work had been going on since the previous autumn. In the coming autumn the house would be ready for furnishing. It was for this purpose that Mrs. Grace required the exact measurements of each room, with the disposition of the wall spaces. During the summer she could thus consider what she would have to do when the time came in October.

Only a corner of the new building was visible from Vandiver Street, the main entrance being on Blankney Place, which was a parallel thoroughfare. Standing in the middle of the grass-plot in front of the dumpy, spurious 1840 Gothic rectory, we had the length of the dumpy, spurious 1840 Gothic church in front of us. The memorial had to be fitted in behind the chancel, on the space formerly occupied by a Sunday-school room. This space had been enlarged by the purchase of the lot in Blankney Place, giving an entry from a more populous neighborhood. The purpose of the memorial had been more or less dictated by Mrs. Ralph Coningsby, who, as Esther Legrand, the rector’s daughter, had from her childhood upward worked among the people round about and knew their needs. As far as I could gather, it was to be a sort of neighborhood club, with parlors, reading-rooms, playing-rooms, a dancing-room, a smoking-room, a billiard-room, a lecture-room, a gymnasium, baths, and so on, and open to those who were properly enrolled, of both sexes and all ages. Of the committee in charge Mrs. Coningsby was apparently the moving spirit, though Mrs. Grace was reserving to herself the pleasure of fitting the house up.

Before going inside we discussed the difficulties of harmonizing a modern building with the efforts of the early nineteenth century, and I had an opportunity to commend Coningsby’s judgment. He had kept to the brownstone of the church and rectory, and had suggested their spirit while working on sober, well-proportioned lines.

In the middle of this I broke off to say: “Look here, old chap! I hope you’re not inventing this job of yours just for the sake of giving me something to do.”

His frank gaze convinced me.

“Honest, I’m not. Mrs. Grace is particularly anxious to have the measurements sent down to her at Rosyth, and we’re so short-handed—”

“Then that’s all right. Let’s go in, and you can show me what I’m to do.”

As Coningsby had said, it was office-boy’s work, but it suited me. It was a matter of getting broken in again, and—whether it came by accident or my friend’s good-heartedness—an easy job in which there was no thinking or responsibility was the most effective means that could have been found of nursing me along. At the end of a week I was treated to the well-nigh incredible wonder of a check.

Early on a Sunday morning I took it to Christian, asking that it should be turned in toward my expenses at the club.

Having read its amount, he held it in his fingers, twisting it and turning it.

“You see, Frank,” he said, after thinking for a minute, “the primary object of the club is not to be paid for what it spends—though that is an object—it’s to help fellows to get on their feet. Of you nineteen chaps who are in the house at present twelve are regularly paying for their board and lodging, and that pretty well carries us along. If there’s a deficit it’s covered by the back payments of men who’ve gone out and who are making up. So that this isn’t pressing for the minute—”

“But I should like to pay it, sir.”

“Yes, of course; but it’s a question of what is most urgent. Now this isn’t urgent; we can extend your credit; whereas, the first bit of bluff we’ve all got to put up when we’re pulling ourselves together is in clothes.”

He asked me how long my present job would go on. I said for about three weeks.

“Then keep this check,” he pursued, handing it back to me, “till you get as much again. That will be enough to turn you out quite smart. Go to Straight, at Bruch Brothers—all our fellows go to him—and he’ll advise you to the best advantage.”

The words were accompanied by such a smile that I, who am not emotional, felt my eyes smart.

_CHAPTER VIII_

The summer passed with no more than two or three other incidents worth the jotting down.

In the first place, the day arrived when I had to make up my mind either to leave the club or to join it. Expecting some opposition from Lovey as to joining it, I was surprised to find him take the suggestion complacently.

“I’ve found out,” he whispered to me, “that yer can jine this club—and fall. Yer can fall three times before they’ll turn ye out.”

“Oh, but you wouldn’t want to fall in cold blood.”